They do not want "slightly less money", they want as much money as possible
As far as I can see they are still living a bit off the "do no evil" of ages ago and latent animosity towards Microsoft, but they're creating an animosity that will take ages to erase unless they start putting some minimal amount of money into customer support today.
Blaspheme!
I gave it a try -- Google offered a free tier vps which was a no brainer. It worked but the ui seemed jank and somewhat confusing. The cost wasn't particularly compelling, so I never deployed. I kept the free tier VPS running for a while to continue evaluation since I value a diversity of services.
However, google charged me like a dollar, and i never saw the charge since i never logged into the webui. I never got an email saying I owe them a dollar so they canceled my GCP access and blacklisted my google account from GCP.
There was a lot of friction here, and the fact that i "feel lucky" I didnt lose my very old gmail account over $1.00 makes me laugh...a very nervous laughter.
I like a lot about google. I cannot depend on google. I use google's AI offering and I am slowly becoming concerned it could affect my legacy email account. Like, everything gets locked and my doctor cannot email me.
Note that doesn't mean you have to do it all yourself, there are plenty of hosting places that you can just configure with your own domain name details.
Some things are still using this email. Hey, I'm not perfect. Sometimes I exceed posted speed limits, too.
Edit: I have to choose a tech giant to get a phone app with decent push notifications as far as I can tell (I haven't scoured the earth for this .... yet) The gmail app is pretty good.
Here are options I can recommend: Proton Tuta Apple (iCloud)
All of these withh be your MX with DMARC/SPF. If you use an android cellphone you'll almost certainly need a google account anyhow. The tuta experience is not as advanced as the others, but is servicable and likely offers better security guarantees than the others. You get a lot of bang for your buck from Proton (personal wireguard tunnel vpn included), and apple is apple.
Simple example - in the early days of Microsoft Office, every new release would cause office confusion. I learned to say "it's the same product, they just moved things around". My conspiratorial sense was that the confusion was intentional to make users feel lost.
That might just be me though.
But it adds a human interaction and that costs money so… no! Suspend.
Sucks.
I don't like this. I too have looked like an attack on their models using things inside the customer-side of google, took special relationships to get over this, an ongoing threat to how we relate to them.
(it's not in GCP btw. different arc of the megaplex)
They’re too big and no one has the authority to clean it up. I’m honestly shocked we don’t see more account suspensions.
I’ve migrated my businesses to Microsoft’s cloud offerings and they’re also a clusterfuck, but at least I can get real support people on the phone pretty easily (for now…).
https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/google-cloud-ac...
I'm not in favor of going to court, but if it does a lawyer doesn't have be very good to think of the above.
A customer does something crappy, e.g.: generates an image they aren't supposed to, and boom you're business Gmail and/or the recovery personal Gmail gone forever.
fool me twice
fool me thrice
You also can't expect it to get any better, both because Alphabet has never shown any interest in improving things and because you and the services you've been using them for aren't the new AI hotness. Even if you're absurdly profitable for them (and you're clearly not) you're not in an area that their internal people are competing to serve.
It's open season for customers, employees, suppliers and contributors.
So Mary from legal walks over to Manager whoever and says "Hey why the fuck did you terminate this guys account? Now I have to go to court."
Account reinstated. You drop the case.
This produces stupidly improved results.
If enough people started making companies show up to small claims court for their shitty behaviour maybe they wouldn't act so shitty.
covers some situations where someone stops you for making money, for no good reason.
"As an example, someone could ... obstruct someone's ability to honor a contract with a client by deliberately refusing to deliver necessary goods."
In this case:
1: SSLMate is a paying customer. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
2: Google harmed SSLMate, and their customers, by deliberately interrupting the services that were paid for.
The big question is if SSLMate was following the terms of service. If SSLMate was actually violating the terms, then it's a hard case to make. Otherwise, Google violated the contract and harmed SSLMate, and is therefore a valid target in US court.
I guess a lawyer can argue against this, but I'd say that losing access to a lifetime if mails is absolutely up there with "legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her."
And from my own experience building software for government services, I can tell you this: In my experience in those systems it is not acceptable to just have a list where someone clicks “deny” all day. Or allow for that matter. We tried with a system were the rule is that the citizen gets <think they apply for> whenever all relevant demands are met. Legal was very clear: No automated decisions either way unless the relevant laws or regulations explicitly allow it, every case has to be reviewed independently — even when the outcome seems completely obvious to anyone who knows the field.
For example, the old Uber with the crazy thing they did. What if in the alternate universe they straight up got banned? That’s it. All investments would go to zero.
The zeitgeist of the time wouldn't have allowed that. Everybody talking about banning Uber or Airbnb was framed as an enemy of progress.
(remote identity proofing and fraud mitigation is a component of my work in finance)
https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3-Implementation-Resources/63A...
https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3-Implementation-Resources/63A...
Lots of businesses can fail at any time. People still run them and work for them as long as it makes money, and WHEN it stops working, they stop that and do something else to make money. All business is ephemeral.
If you use Google at this point for commercial services, you get what you deserve when they nuke your resources (caveat being services you cannot go elsewhere for, like an Android dev account). The evidence is robust they cannot be relied upon as a commercial services provider. Stop. using. Google.
(thoughts and opinions always my own, I am aware and understand in this context OP needs Google Cloud to integrate with customers in Google Cloud, which is very unfortunate, and so their Sisyphus task continues)
I run mine on a Pi4 no problem whatsoever, but I guess a VPS could also be used, although the scamalytics analysis will show it's a server or an IP shared with an anonymising VPN etc. if it's a shared IP on the host.
I could not get from the OP what really happened and what was the claim / explanation from Google side.
You cant use anything from Google. I only use gmail, my mail account only got banned one time for a week. For years I thought the punishment for using gmail was just a mater of time. I tried to imagine what weird things could trigger it. Maybe they will one day just end the service because it isn't profitable enough?
I decided the most likely would be that the mail account gets banned as a punishment for using any of their other services.
Then I made the "mistake" to switch from iphone to android. It almost immediately started complaining that my mailbox was full. The new reality is that each and every button I press on the phone could potentially end my mailbox.
Now that they [also] have very sophisticated LLM's the crappy customer service seems intentional.
We opened a case to appeal asking for more details or a review. Meanwhile, we're scrambling to implement some kind of workaround for our users that log in with their Google account.
And then early the next day, we get the email that our appeal was granted. Just need to be sure we follow the terms and conditions in the future.
I guess it could have been worse but still a bit of a slap in the face.
Lesson: if you use a CC with GCP or cloud services, firewall it from everything else you do to be safe.
Haha, what "people"? Even people who aren't computer techies seems to be aware having a Google account is "a privilege lost at any time for any reason", almost everyone seems to know at least one acquaintance that somehow lost access to their personal account at one point and if you bring up any Google products in discussions, it isn't uncommon to hear "Yeah, I'd give that a try if I want to use a product that only works for a year".
Not sure there are many people left treating Google as a "trusted partner" unless you have a multi-million deal/contact with them.
Any hosted email, paid or free, is going to have terms and conditions and you will be able to find anecdotes from people whose service was suspended "for no reason" but it's that or buy your own domain and host your own email.
Those aren't the only two options, there are two in the middle ground (and perhaps more that I'm failing to think of) that are well worth considering.
Option 1:
The best option IMO (what I chose, anyway) is to buy your own domain, and point its DNS MX records to a reliable email provider, which can even be gmail (though they're not who I chose).
That way you get almost none of the hassle of hosting your own email - it's very quick to set up the DNS records when you first get the domain, easy enough that even non-tech people can follow a simple tutorial, and after that you don't have anything to manage - and you don't need to worry about whether your emails will look trustworthy enough to avoid going straight into most people's spam folders (so long as you pick a provider that most of the world's email servers do tend to trust, such as gmail).
But if you do get locked out by the email provider you choose, you can point the DNS records at a different provider and not have lost your address. Obviously it's slightly more expensive than using gmail for free, but it's fairly cheap, affordable for many people (though not everyone).
Option 2:
Alternatively, if you need to stick to a free solution, you could create a free account at two different providers (let's say Protonmail and Gmail, or Hotmail and Yahoo, or...); have one of them as your primary email account, that you use like normal, but use the other one for signing up to accounts that would be a problem to lose ability to receive emails from.
Have the second account set up to automatically forward everything to your primary account. That way, when you need to click an email verification link, or open a password reset email, or whatever, it will have been forwarded to the inbox you use normally, so there's no extra hassle. But if you do lose access to your main account, you can still login to the account that receives the important emails to access them directly and to change it to forward to a new primary account elsewhere.
Of course there's still technically a risk that your important emails account could also be shut, but if you are only using it to receive emails from companies that you create accounts with, and you're never sending anything from it nor using it for any other services (ie not also using it for YouTube or similar) then the chances of losing access are almost as low as the chances of that business completely disappearing without warning.
I've never talked to anyone outside of tech circles like this that has any inkling that Google just shutters people's digital lives with no warning or recourse.
In general, with any kind of mainstream large company, you should assume that the overall public perception of them is that they're fine, of course, if they weren't why would they be so big and popular??
Because they generally don't do this. The people who get suspended are not just normies using gmail. They are (as in this case) running complicated services doing a lot of access to Google APIs and though likely with no bad intent are activating tripwires that Google has set up to detect abuse.
I thought I was specific enough but seems maybe I wasn't clear enough. I'm specifically talking about "outside of tech circles" (hence the "Even people who aren't computer techies"). I'm talking about acquaintances that works in retail stores, gas stations and similar, even these people seem averse to Google today when I've chatted with them about it for unrelated reasons.
Maybe it's because this is in Europe and people generally have more measured views of US companies, especially as of late? Not sure how it looks/seems in other parts in the world, but since I'm bound to one location, I definitely live in some sort of local bubble here like everyone else on this earth, not gonna lie :)
> Haha, what "people"?
You should see the sideways looks I get from people when they find out I backup all our gmail to another service and don't allow employees to use Google SSO logins for sites. Just encase googles 'fraud' bots randomly shut down our workspace. I don't want the entire business to ground to a halt because we can't login to any sites.
Practice or experimentation – Some folks test models by having them participate in “realistic” online discussions to see if they can blend in, reason well, or emulate community tone.
Engagement farming – A few users or bots might automate posting to build karma or drive attention to a linked product or blog.
Time-saving for lurkers – Some people who read HN a lot but don’t like writing might use a model to articulate or polish a thought.
Subtle persuasion / seeding – Companies or advocacy groups occasionally use LLMs to steer sentiment about technologies, frameworks, or policy topics, though HN’s moderation makes that risky.
Just for fun – People like to see if a model can sound “human enough” to survive an HN thread without being called out.
So, yeah — not much at stake, but it’s a good sandbox for observing model behavior in the wild.
Would you say you’ve actually spotted comments that felt generated lately?
Trouble is that whilst many have realized that Google (like much of Big Tech) is the quintessential example of a Poisoned Chalice they remain all too aware they've little choice but to endure or risk unavoidable abuse.
The tragedy of the modern internet is that these monopolies have reduced competition and choice to irrelevancies.
Sometimes protests that reach enough crowd get heard and the problem gets fixed...
That's the stuff of revolution. Feudalists don't listen until forced to under duress, that's when things usually turn very nasty—shades of 1789 and like. The Ancien Régime sans a head or two.
Feudalists all have certain traits in common: arrogance and a sense of superiority coupled with shortsightedness and a lack of empathy.
Does Google-synced passkeys on Google Password Manager still work even when your account is suspended?
Can't recover your accounts because you can't access your email, unless Google still allows existing email client access even when suspended but I'm not unfortunate enough to test this out.
> You can access data from your users' Google Cloud projects by creating a service account to represent your service, and then having your customers grant that service account appropriate access to their cloud data using IAM policies. Note that you might want to create a service account per customer if you need to avoid confused deputy problems.
If you look at most SaaS services, they rarely use a service account per customer. IMO it's no different than any part of your own services where you need to handle multiple customers. Creating multiple service accounts is just overhead.
They got used to ads money, where they control the entire board. They never got good in other types of businesses. Especially not in customer service.
The answer is extremely simple. People aren’t businesses. You are right, no business should choose Google. But people do, for their own reasons. And businesses can only act through people. And people have their own priorities which override the interest of the business, like “What should I choose to never be blamed if/when it fails?” Google is an extremely safe bet there, like IBM of old.
Google ain't it.
Reddit recently shadowbanned me as my account was approaching 20 years old. There was no message about what violation had been committed, and attempts to appeal went unanswered. All posts started getting filtered at some point and all comments throttled.
The Fediverse provides a template for a better way-- smaller connected services with better moderator to user ratios.
It would take thousands, at least, with top training and the breathing space to actually engage with customers individually. Mind you Google should still do it in my opinion.
Is it still true that pretty much anyone can post your handle with #fediblock and get you and your entire instance sent to the cornfield automatically by hundreds of servers? This destroyed my city's mastodon instance and drove everyone I knew there to bluesky.
I've been on the Fediverse for nearly a decade. I've jumped instances a few times. I'm currently with an instance run by a friend I've known online for well over a decade, who does have a strict moderation approach, but is also reachable out-of-band and is quite responsive and principled.
On Reddit, Google, FB, etc., you've got a single provider, and if they freeze you out you are fully frozen out.
The companies you speak of are billion- and trillion-dollar companies. Banning people is not the only viable way of doing things.
They have the money. They choose not to spend it.
So to Google, killing accounts of malicious actors is a primary concern, and obviously you can wield a lot of damage to people through google's services if unchecked. And even with checks, every bad actor wears the mask of innocence when appealing.
So this puts Google in a rather intractable position. Without numbers it's hard to say whether they are leaning to hard towards stopping fraud (many false positives), or too hard towards giving accounts freedom (high levels of malware served).
Yesterday was a wise account(1), the week before was GitHub (2)
Companies are fiefdoms, they’re not democracies with a judicial system. If one of the automated sheriffs identifies you as a criminal, it doesn’t put you on trial, but directly sentences you to jail. Your process from there is never clear and it's anyone's guess to what the outcome will be.
1: https://shaun.nz/why-were-never-using-wise-again-a-cautionar...
The Great Decoupling of Labor and Capital: https://www.mbi-deepdives.com/the-great-decoupling-of-labor-... explains this with numbers: Alphabet required 76k employees to get to their first $100 Billion. Their most recent incremental $100 Billion? Just 11,000! (assuming they add another 3k employees in 4Q’25)
N=1
I guess it would a hassle to go to the bank but loosing some images or old emails wouldn't be so catastrophic TBH. Maybe being somewhat nihilistic/minimalist I think that it all will still be lost when I die, so why trying to grasp those things? In some sense it's kind of liberating not depending too much on these kind of things.
If Google has something similar this seems preferable to the alternatives.
Just anedotally, I've had my wechat account blocked before and it took less than a day to talk to a person to get it sorted. At least PRC censorship has good customer service.
znpy•6h ago
After the third occurrence of this i’d blame this on you, honestly.
rcruzeiro•6h ago
znpy•2h ago
If you had actually read the post you would have understood there are ways to ditch GCP, but they are perceived as cumbersome.
The exaple is OpenID Connect. It works well with Azure (according to the post).
I'm sorry to say this, but the author is choosing something easy but unrealiable over something a bit more complicated but reliable.
It's really the author's fault. They are choosing their comfort over the service reliability (and keeping promises made to customers).
Heck they might even go with api keys. They could give explicit direction on the minimal amount of permissions the api key would need and they could ping the users each 3-4 months to rotate them.
But no, I guess we'll have another post at some point about the fourth (definitive?) account suspension.
x0x0•1h ago
That's nonsense. It requires a 7 step setup process that customers will mess up.
fiskfiskfisk•6h ago
I'm sure they'd be happy to not have rely on having a Google Cloud account for integration with Google Cloud if possible.
october8140•6h ago
agwa•6h ago
anonym29•5h ago
Using GCP, AWS, or Azure is like volunteering to use your own money to rent heavy construction equipment to construct your own jail cell and excavate your own grave.
But hey, at least you get to avoid the capex on the heavy construction equipment, and it's always¹ available!
¹ except for when human error takes it offline for 14 hours straight
TheOtherHobbes•5h ago
znpy•2h ago
First time is a fluke, second time is a serious wake-up call, third time it's your fault.
Do you really want to reach the point where all your customers have an outage, you have to rush implementing something else (oidc or api keys) AND rush your customers to change your settings?
kassner•10m ago
philipwhiuk•6h ago